KIST：新竹縣峨眉國民中學

A Very Short Introduction to E-Mei Junior High School

        E-Mei Junior High School (EJHS) is located in Hsinchu County, Taiwan. It is the highest level of education in E-Mei Township. Being the only junior high school in E-Mei, we take graduates from neighboring schools such as E-Mei Elementary School and Fu-Shing Elementary School. Since E-Mei is largely known for its Oriental Beauty Tea, incoming students are required to take a mandatory three day crash course to become familiar with the process of making tea. Students are also obliged to study various subjects such as math, geography, history, science, social science, art, music, PE, Chinese, and English.

        Our school-based curriculum features a well-rounded systematic understanding of tea, helping our students to delve into the long-neglected, multi-faceted beauty of local tea community. With an interdisciplinary attempt, the curriculum further aims to develop in the students a concern from the local to the global.

        Our tea reconnaissance special topic—“踏茶”—features the stage-by-stage training of little tea masters and the guided operating of on-campus tea house and tea house(s) in the neighborhood. We introduce the students to local tea cultures and foster in them sociability through occasional performances of tea arts and their creative marketing of tea beverages and related food products.

Our tea reconnaissance special topic—“尋眉”—features how students understand the cultural knowledge of tea in action. First, students visit three to five local sights of E-Mei. With the help from the instructors, they are able to create their own guidebooks collaboratively, using plenty of writing techniques. Second, students will be involved in a curating project in which tea cultures worldwide are exhibited through hands-on activities.

        All the pedagogies above blend direct instruction and inquiry-based instruction learning together appropriately, fulfilling the ideal in which students genuinely appreciate knowledge and take up concrete skills when “learning by doing.”

We have also been creatively reforming our English courses. Traditional textbooks have been completely discarded, and we encourage our students to learn English from a variety of materials. When reading together, we familiarize them with narrative genres and further guide them through graphic organizers. The students thus start to develop in themselves higher-order thinking and cognitive skills step by step.

        Our passionate students treat people with sincerity, and their temperaments are mostly inherited locally from the rustic charm of E-Mei. On the teacher’s end, we have a bunch of Romantic idealists who seek to liberate the whole campus from the established rigid framework of traditional education. We teachers collaborate with each other and strive to flip our classrooms, hoping that the students can think out of the box and realize what is really vital in life. We aspire to make E-Mei Junior High School a pleasant learning environment where the students take the initiative, engage the public, and seek the common good; in other words, they can ultimately educate themselves into independent citizens in this age of globalization and interdependence.